~ Our Reason To Hope

Hope is a word with a Pandora ’s Box of meanings, or at least attributes.  If we add a suffix or a prefix it changes, entirely, the meaning of the word.  Context also will shape the strength or weakness of the word.  For example you may hope you get a raise but the outcome apart from dollars and cents is minimal whereas if you are standing on a bungee launch board and you hope that you survive it becomes a matter of life and death.

This is the way it is with spiritual matters as well.  

Hope is the brickwork of that makes our house of faith work, and Jesus is the foundation on which our hope is based.  The question that each of us must ask ourselves is just how much weight we are prepared to trust on our foundation and can our building stand the stress.  For myself I believe God for my life in its absolute basic level, I count the Master as not only my Saviour but also as my standard of behaviour.

This is not an easy statement; I regularly fail to live up to the standard that I see Jesus living.  But the point of our hope is just that we are all bound to fail, that is the reason we live in a state of grace.  God knows that we are prone to live a life that is not the full bottle, even the holiest of us.  Even before Jesus was born the dye had been cast, He was aware even then that we would not come up to scratch but He loves us so much Jesus died for us.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews put it this way

“ The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It's our handle on what we can't see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.”  Heb 11:1-2 (Msg)

The NIV puts it like this

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” Heb 11:1

Biblical hope is by this definition is a very nebulous affair.  It is not a matter of knowledge or experience.  It is a “confidence,” an “assurance” about “things we cannot see”.  We can feel that this or that may be right but the Bible text is more than that.  The definition from Hebrews states that faith is a decision “ex nihilo”, there is no proof in the realm of human existence that equates to living vulnerable like this verse described.

Of course the history of faith as outlined in Hebrews, and since, is that generations have lived by faith.  They had no more guarantee than we have and we too have no proof that there is a Heaven or Hell.  For that matter there is no proof of an afterlife.  We must decide who we believe and stake our life to that belief while being prepared to prove the unprovable in our life and relationships. 

The faith that we have, we are given.  God enables all who decide for Him to hope and believe.  The message of this blog is that “God is” and He wants to have all mankind who will to join Him through relationship with Jesus His Son and we have the task of taking His love to those who will join us.

So it is now over to each of us to think through our faith and live it up to the maximum as we love the people Father brings into our lives and live to glorify Father for others.  Are we ready?